stern gang king david hotel
On that ''Black Saturday'' about 25,000 troops smashed into homes and kibbutzim, arresting 2,500 Jews and confiscat ing weapons. It was also a direct attack on British intelligence and counterterrorist efforts in Palestine: both MI5 and SIS — the Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6 — had stations in the hotel. Adina Hay-Nissan, then a teen-age girl who moved easily as an Irgun courier, was giv en the job of calling inthe warning. This led to the identification of 40 individuals with suspected extremist sympathies, 25 of whom were discharged from the armed forces. Purpose: To drive the British from Palestine . The bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem on that day killed 92 British, Jewish and Arab personnel and wounded a further 58. To complicate matters further, they also frequently made use of false identities and disguises. The information he provided led to the arrest of 27 Irgun fighters, including the father of a later Israeli cabinet minister. The bombing of the King David Hotel brought the coordinated Hebrew Resistance Movement, which had been forged between the Haganah, the Irgun and the Stern Gang, to an end. ''I am sorry about what happened about the casualties,'' said Israel Levi, who now sells office supplies, and then, under the code name Gideon, set the fuses. The SIME reports were derived from the interrogation of captured Irgun and Stern Gang fighters, from local police agents in Palestine, and from liaisons with official Zionist political groups like the Jewish Agency. cial burden that London could not afford. It did not take much detective work for MI5 to discover that the two groups were receiving technical support from the IRA. The man who set the fuses was there. Some of those in the first wave reached their targets, but they did not result in any casualties. MI5 was thus faced with the real possibility that terrorists could arrive in Britain wearing British military uniforms. ''I was then against terror, and I am today,'' he told the gathering. July 22, 1946. '' 'See, We Warned You'. The Irgun has been viewed as a terrorist organization or organization which carried out terrorist acts. All rights reserved.Â. MI5’s ranks were reduced from 350 officers at its height in 1943, to just a hundred in 1946. The infamous King David Hotel bombing that occurred on the 22nd of July, 1946, resulted in the deaths of nearly a hundred people including Britains, Jews, and Arabs (Fromkin 688). On April 9, 1947 for no good strategic reason Mr. Nevertheless, if Operation Embarrass had been made public, the fact that SIS agents were mining boats containing Holocaust survivors would have been disastrous for the British government. In order to enhance the intelligence cooperation on IRA-Irgun-Stern Gang links, in October 1947 MI5 dispatched an officer and a Palestine police officer, Maj. J. O’Sullivan, temporarily in London to brief MI5 on Zionist terrorism, to Dublin. British forces conducted mass arrests across Palestine (codenamed Operation Agatha), culminating on June 29 — a day known as "Black Sabbath" because it was a Saturday — with the detention of more than 2,700 Zionist leaders and minor officials, as well as officers of the official Jewish defense force (Haganah) and its crack commandos (Palmach). Several Zionist leaders advocated cooperation with the Soviet Union, including the head of "security" for the Jewish Agency in Palestine, Moshe Sneh, who was aware of, if not actively involved, with planning the King David Hotel bombing. ... Iâm going out with my gang to spray paint some unlucky peopleâs houses and cars, and scare punky kids. His wife, Yochevet, also of the Irgun, said she was revolted by the question, ''How do you feel? '', Last night's reception, in the Blue Room just off the hotel's lobby, drew about 100 people and began with a minute of silence for the 91 people killed in the blast - British, Arabs and Jews. She recalled last night that she had waited for a long time outside the hotel until she got a signal that the charges were planted. Kollek is known to have provided MI5 with counterterrorist intelligence in Palestine: for example, in August 1945 he revealed the location of a secret Irgun training camp near Binyamina, and told an MI5 officer that "it would be a great idea to raid the place." ''I felt myself like a soldier of these Jewish forces. In sharp contrast to his father, Chaim Herzog served in British military intelligence on D-Day, went on to help establish the Israeli intelligence community, and eventually became president of Israel. In early 1946 an Anglo-American committee of inquiry was appointed to find a settlement in Palestine, but despite the best efforts of its members, who in April 1946 recommended that a compromise be found so that Jews should not dominate Arabs in Palestine, nor Arabs dominate Jews, the committee’s findings were not accepted by either party. How Zionist Extremism Became British Spiesâ Biggest Enemy. Cairo-Haifa train bombings - assassinated Lord Moyne in 1944 and Count Bernadotte in 1948. They still treat Palestinians and Israeli Arabs as 2nd class citizens and even Eithopean Jews. In Palestine itself, MI5’s liaison officer stationed in Jerusalem in the post-war years, Henry Hunloke, a former Conservative MP, maintained close liaison with Jewish Agency officials, and acquired valuable intelligence from them, for example on suspected terrorists clandestinely entering or leaving Palestine. Initially, all three endorsed the plan to blow up British headquarters at the King David. 'Sadness and Mourning'. July 2, 1946: The King David Hotel in Jerusalem was bombed. They were provoked by a British Army action against Jew ish leaders and settlemen ts on June 29, 1946. '', Yitzhak Tobiana, who guarded a corridor, caught the mixture of emotions. The bomb failed to detonate because its timer broke. She walked slowly up Jaffa Road, and as she passed a police station near the market at Mahane Yehuda, she recalled, ''I heard the big explosion.'' Moderates and Radicals. The Jewish Struggle appears to have ceased publication soon after. ''We know how to love, we know how to hate. Another source of concern was the Jewish Struggle, a Zionist "Revisionist" publication based in London that frequently reprinted extremist Irgun propaganda from Palestine, typically denouncing the British as "Nazis" and advocating the use of violence. At 12:37 p.m. the bombs exploded, ripping the facade from the southwest corner of the building. The Irgun planted a huge seven piece time bomb in the King David Hotel, in Palestine, on July 22, 1946 killing 91 people and injuring 46, most of whom were not British officials. He undoubtedly would have secretly welcomed the terrorist campaign waged in the British Mandate of Palestine as undermining the British empire, but when he was working on Zionist affairs for SIS — and by extension for the KGB — immediately after the war, the Soviet Union’s policy toward Palestine had not yet crystallized. The Stern Gang, under Shamir, also assassinated the U.N. representative to ⦠The situation was made all the more alarming for MI5 by the fact that members of the Irgun and the Stern Gang were known to have served in British forces during the war. On the morning of July 22, six young Irgun members entered the hotel disguised as Arabs, carrying milk churns packed with 500 pounds of explosives. The King David massacre, July 22, 1946. Adapted from EMPIRE OF SECRETS Copyright © 2013 Calder Walton. But I feel very sorry about the number of victims.'' Zionist terrorists blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, which housed the central offices of the civilian administration of the government of Palestine, killing or injuring more than 200 persons. In fact, MI5’s policy toward the Jewish Agency was duplicitous: it cooperated with it, but at the same time kept it under close surveillance, running telephone and letter ch By then the leaders of the Haganah had distanced themselves from having participated in the attack and issued a statement denouncing the dissidents of Irgun and the Stern Gang, just as they had after the attack on the King David Hotel in July 1946. The Stern Gang also operated underground. Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions. Just like the former members of a number of other guerrilla groups the British armed during the war, such as communist forces in Malaya, the Irgun and the Stern Gang used their training in explosives and other paramilitary warfare against their former masters. They liaised with the Irish CID, which kept Briscoe under surveillance and passed its findings on to MI5. In March 1947 an Irgun operative left a bomb at the Colonial Club, near St Martin’s Lane in the heart of London, which blew out the club’s windows and doors, injuring several servicemen. MI5’s security measures also involved heightened inspections at ports and other points of entry to the United Kingdom, to each of which an MI5-compiled "Index of Terrorists" was distributed, while on its advice Scotland Yard ratcheted up its protection of many leading political and public figures, and increased the number of officers detailed to guard Buckingham Palace. King Hussein Monarch of Jordan, opposed of PLO raids and kicked them out in 1970. www.overlookpress.com. The deputy leader of the Conservative Party, Sir Anthony Eden, carried a letter bomb around with him for a whole day in his briefcase, thinking it was a Whitehall circular that could wait till the evening to be read, and only realized what it was when he was warned by the police of the planned attack, on information provided by MI5. The following month a female Irgun agent left an enormous bomb, consisting of 24 sticks of explosives, at the Colonial Office in London. These have left few traces within records previously in the public domain, but as we can now see from MI5’s own records, they were often extremely elaborate. For the entire duration of the Cold War, the overwhelming priority for the intelligence services of Britain and other Western powers would lie with counterespionage, but as we can now see, in the crucial transition period from World War to Cold War, MI5 was instead primarily concerned with counterterrorism. Even now, in middle age, they had a stony toughness in their eyes. On July 22, 1946, Irgun blew up a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 soldiers and civilians (British, Arab, and Jewish). Hotel explosion in Jerusalem. By David K. Shipler, Speci Al To the New York Times. '', ''We are people,'' she said. In the absence of still-closed KGB archives, Philby’s precise role in Zionist matters must remain a matter for speculation. '', Then, she said, she ran to King George Street and phoned the French Consulate, which was near the hotel. In April 1945 an urgent cable from MI5’s outfit in the Middle East, SIME, warned that Victory in Europe (VE-Day) would be a D-Day for Jewish terrorists in the Middle East. He is writing a book about British, American, and Soviet intelligence in the Cold War. More specifically, MI5 knew that some extremist Zionist groups operating in the United States, such as the "Bergson Group" and the "Hebrew Committee for the Liberation of Palestine," were raising funds and logistical support for the Irgun and the Stern Gang, with explosives and ammunition sometimes being sent in food packages to Britain. Although the declassified documentation is presently incomplete, it seems likely that the Jewish Agency representative who met MI5’s cut-out in London was Teddy Kollek, later a long-standing and celebrated mayor of Jerusalem, who during the war had become the deputy head of the Jewish Agency’s intelligence department. Operation Embarrass did not stop there. Then she went farther along and phoned The Palestine Post, a newspaper that is now The Jerusalem Post. Lehi, however, continued its activities. Under Begin, the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in 1946, killing 97 British civil servants. One was over a lavish meal of "oysters, duck and petit pots de creme au chocolat," while another featured gin and "rich red roast beef ." We have all the emotions of everybody else. In November 1944 the Stern Gang had assassinated the British minister for the Middle East, Lord Moyne, while he was returning to his rented villa after a luncheon engagement in Cairo. This occurred nine months after the destruction of the King David Hotel, a time when the British government began to give up on keeping the peace in Palestine. The Mayor had already left and did not hear the accusation. But their commander, Menachem Begin, now Prime Minister of Israel, did not attend. Both groups were organized vertically into cells, whose members were unknown to those in other cells, and whose extreme loyalty meant they were nearly impossible to penetrate. Initially, all three endorsed the plan to blow up British headquarters at the King David. SIS’s investigations into Zionist terrorism all the more interesting. Reports landing on MI5’s desks throughout the summer of 1946 warned that Irgun and Stern Gang fighters were likely to be still serving within British military ranks, and were planning to use that as a cover to travel to Britain. The King David Hotel WAS NOT A MILITARY INSTALLATION. The position afforded him a legitimate interest in the Middle East — an interest that he probably also inherited from his father, the noted Arabist, Harry St John Philby. Sir Stafford Cripps was only saved by the quick thinking of his secretary, who became suspicious of a package whose contents seemed to fizz, With bitter irony, some of them had been trained by Britain’s wartime sabotage agency, SOE, and its foreign intelligence services, SIS, while serving in the elite Palmach commando unit of the Jewish paramilitary organization, the Haganah. Its administrative records reveal that it was forced to start buying cheaper ink and paper, and its officers were instructed to type reports on both sides of paper to save money. One of the agency officials from whom both MI5 and SIS (MI6) received counterterrorist intelligence was Reuven Zislani, who worked in the foreign intelligence department of the Jewish Agency. Briscoe, who in his own words "would do business with Hitler if it was in Ireland’s good," made several trips to Britain before the war and met Irgun representatives there. It obtained typewriters that were known to be used by dissident Arab groups and Soviet authorities, and used them to type letters implicating both groups, which it then carefully leaked around Whitehall. They were called the Irgun Zevai Leumi ("National Military Organization," or the Irgun for short) and the Lehi (an acronym in Hebrew for "Freedom Fighters of Israel"), which the British also termed the "Stern Gang," after its founding leader, Avraham Stern. MI5’s new director-general, Sir Percy Sillitoe, was so alarmed that in August 1946 he personally briefed the prime minister on the situation, warning him that an assassination campaign in Britain had to be considered a real possibility, and that his own name was known to be on a Stern Gang hit list. The meetings did produce some intelligence on Irgun and Stern Gang fighters suspected of being about to leave Palestine, whose names MI5 placed on "watch lists" at British ports and airports. Nevertheless, Moscow certainly would have been interested to learn, through him, that London suspected Soviet involvement in Zionist terrorism. This was truly the stuff of smoke and mirrors. The years after World War II were not kind to Britain’s intelligence services — especially MI5, its domestic counterintelligence and security agency. ''I was sorry a long time afterwards,'' he said, ''but they had a lot of time, more than half an hour, they all had time to get out. ecks on its London headquarters even while it was liaising with its officers. Tyler Spafford, whose wife's uncle, Bernard Godwin Bourdillon, was among the victims, gazed out over the proceedings and pronounced them inappropriate. After 1948 Zislani changed his name to Reuven Shiloah and became the first head of Israel’s foreign intelligence service, the Mossad. In 1947 100,000 troops — one-tenth of the military manpower of the entire British empire — were tied down in Palestine, a finan It was a narrative that was very discomforting and at odds with what I had so firmly believed. Its assumption in doing this was that Irgun or Stern Gang operatives who succeeded in gaining entry to Britain would at some point make contact with these organizations or individuals, and therefore scrutinizing their activities could provide crucial leads to tracking them down. The King David Hotel bombing was an extremist Zionist attack carried out on July 22, 1946, carried out by the Irgun on the British administrative headquarters for Palestine. Moscow initially supported the creation of the state of Israel, hoping that it would be a thorn in the side of the "imperialist" West, and the Soviet Union was the first country in the world to recognize Israel when it was established in May 1948. The former chief rabbi of Ireland, Isaac Herzog, was also an open supporter of both Irish Republican and Zionist terrorism. The occasion was to publicize the @Hebrew-language edition of ''By Blood and Fire,'' a book on the King David bombing by an American author, Thurston Clarke, who spent three years researching and writing a detailed chronicle of one of the most controversial incidents in the Jews' struggle for an independent homeland. Menachem Begin was known to travel under several aliases, and in the wake of the King David Hotel bombing he managed to elude the Palestine police and the bounty on his head by a series of clever disguises. Killing 91 people Menachem Begin planned the destruction of the King David Hotel and the massacre of Deir Yassin. Menachem Begin and Nathan Friedman-Yellin, a leader of the Stern Gang, were both of Polish origin, and MI5 rightly suspected that the Soviets had helped them "escape" to Palestine during the war. The man who brought the explosives into Jerusalem, the man who guarded a key corridor, the man who was drinking quietly in the bar, were there. Begin led, worked underground to attack British and Arab targets in retribution for attacks on Jews. The two waves of bombs were posted from an underground cell in Italy. The front line of its counterterrorist defense was what was termed "personnel security," which involved making background checks and scrutinizing visa applications for entry into Britain. Begin's Irgun terrorists, with encouragement from Ben-Gurion's Hagana, blew up the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, murdering 92. MI5's dossiers on the group released this week cast the Cold War's early years in a stark new light: Terrorism, not the Soviet Union, was the main threat The wrecked wing at the King David hotel where the British government chief secretary's office was located, immediately after the explosion, Jerusalem, July 22, 1946. To investigate Zionist groups and individuals in Britain, MI5 used the full repertoire of investigative techniques at its disposal. The Irgun was the dominant Jewish terrorist organization, both in size and the number and frequency of its attacks. By September 1947 the JIC in London was painting a gloomy picture for the British government of the future of the Mandate, concluding that any settlement would be unacceptable either to Jews or Arabs. After all, this was a time when, in Austerity Britain, bread rationing was in place. Britain found itself in a situation that was rapidly becoming ungovernable. The story soon leaked to the press, with the News Chronicle running the headline "Palestine Hunting a New Face," and sarcastically noting that although Begin might have changed his appearance, it was "likely that the flat feet and bad teeth have remained." The King David Hotel bombing is a bitterly contested event, even in Israel. I always had trouble envisioning it, and understanding what was meant that a âwingâ of the hotel was destroyed. See, we warned you. With these startling reports coming into its London headquarters, MI5 devised a range of measures to prevent the extension of Zionist terrorism from Palestine to Britain. The Irgun and the Stern Gang’s wartime track record ensured that MI5 took these warnings seriously. Despite the value of this information, one MI5 officer could not help noting that his mouth started to water when he read Scorpion’s reports. Unfortunately for MI5, in the post-war years it faced the worst possible combination of circumstances: reduced resources, but increased responsibilities. As World War II came to a close, MI5 received a stream of intelligence reports warning that the Irgun and the Stern Gang were not just planning violence in the Mandate of Palestine, but were also plotting to launch attacks inside Britain. The hotel was quickly rebuilt and no signs (that I know of) exist. Together with its counterterrorist operations in Britain, in the immediate post-war years Britain’s intelligence services were also assessing and countering Jewish "illegal" immigration to Palestine. ''I think it's sad that there is such a jovial party over such an unfortunate incident,'' he said. Protests over the arrest of a popular opposition leader highlight the decline in what was a beacon of democracy in West Africa. This was, however, another public relations disaster for the British government, whose critics accused it of establishing "Nazi-style concentration camps." This caused the collapse of several floors in the hotel, resulting in the deaths of 91 people. The Stern Gang was a violent sect of Zionists who were fed up with British occupation, so they blew up the King David Hotel. MI5’s suspicions have been confirmed by subsequent research, which shows that on several occasions the Stern Gang appealed to Moscow for aid. As it turned out, the reports of Begin’s plastic surgery were inaccurate: they were caused by confusion within the Palestine police (CID) when comparing photos of him. None of the important Irgun or Stern Gang leaders was caught in the dragnet, and its result was merely to goad them into even more violent counteractions. Philby had less motivation for sabotaging British investigations into Zionist terrorism, however, than he did in other fields. By Teresa Chai. The Chinese government may soon regret choosing to crack down on women from Xinjiangâs Muslim minority. The British also deported some Irgun and Stern fighters to detention centers in Eritrea, which again attracted claims that they were no better than the Nazis. See the article in its original context from. It was, however, symptomatic of a much deeper problem that undermined British rule in Palestine: Britain was faced with a range of contradictory demands regarding the future of the Mandate — from Jews, Arabs and world opinion at large.